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In this thirty-eighth of the Guido Brunetti novels, the scene opens with a boyish prank that ends up at the Questura, with those officers working the nightshift calling miscreant's parents to scare their sons into behaving. The scene with the boy gangs and their ignominious capture seems a throw-away lead-in to something very much darker.
Leon's novel is a typical Brunetti mystery, with its slow unfolding, its conversations over coffee, dips into classic literature, diffident visits to the office of the bumbling Vice-Questore. Brunetti's wife, highly educated professor of American Literature who teaches Henry James' novels, and their two children, now as teens and young adults, do not play as major a role as they have in the past.
Since COVID, I find Leon's novels to be slower, less bloody, and very thoughtful of those small trespasses that eventually lead to our society's most egregious wrongdoings. This novel is one of those. Adding to the gravitas of this work is the title. A REFINER'S FIRE is Biblical (several locations). In one, two thirds of the Israelites will be devoured in flames. The remaining third, having passed through refining fire, will have a clarified vision of the power of God.
dramatis personae: Commissario Guido Brunetti, raised in Venice and educated, who reads Latin classics as an anodyne to man's inhumanity; Commissario Claudia Griffoni, native of Naples, who is able to draw forth truths during interrogation using her sympathy, her beauty, and her delicacy; Signorina Elettra, administrative assistant at the Questore and a wizard sans pareil concerning matters electronic; Vice-Questore Patta, Guido's insecure, lying, self-centered and stupid supervisor; war hero Quartermaster Dario Monforte, whose present does not jibe with his background; injured war hero Daniel Campi, Carabiniere, who is willing to talk about what really happened; injured war hero Brigadiere Lino Ricco, Carabiniere, confined to a wheelchair and mentally harmed by an IED blast; MIA war casualty Valeriano Ginzoletti; Carabiniere, officers of the police; members of a boy gang, including Monforte's son; members of extended families, citizens and tourists in Venice.
At the center of the work, Guido Brunetti is asked to discover any unsavory background in Dario Monforte's life. In this, post-heroic, existence, Monforte installs burglar protection, and a customer wants him vetted. In this innocent beginning, Brunetti feels the prickings of his thumbs. What makes a hero? Why doesn't Dario have any medals?
Brunetti's research (really, Sra. Electra's research) leads Brunetti to a terrible story of a truck bomb during the second Iraqi War. Before the truck bomb, flights coming into the US-owned airfield in Italy were carrying strange cargo, valuable, beautiful cargo. In Iraq, weapons were going missing. That does not seem to have been the most troubling problem to the Carabiniere in Iraq. Some of the goods being placed on the black market are being diverted. There is a traitor among thieves, but no honor.
After the bomb at the carabiniere's compound in Iraq, a few injured men come home to Italy. In the police procedural, Brunetti interviews the war heroes to discover what really happened at the Carabiniere compound.
Leon's novel begins in boyish pranks, explodes in the middle, ends in fire. Is it a refiner's fire? Did the "right" people come through the flames to proceed sinless? I cannot answer this question.
§ Cathy Downs, Prof. Emerita at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, keeps a garden, feeds the cats, designs quilts, and enjoys good books of the mysterious sort.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, June 2024
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